iriniasvisual-blog

[iriniasvisual-blog]

stick to the body

What is this sticky body doing and how does it matter?

- - - - - - - video underneath the post - - - - - - - - - - - - 

It is a virtual avatar of my recorded figure. My recorded figure is dancing. Is the sticky figure dancing as well? It is, but in its own (own?) way. It does not copy me even after lowering its confidence weight. It has a substance of its own (own?) and this makes our partnership interesting. We are not a synchronised duet. I am me and it is something after me. It is not my reflection - rather it is a diffraction of my visual input. It is influenced by me. It interacts with me. But it is also constructed by me in one of the ways Judith Butler describes as ways of construction, in regard to whether they presuppose or not a subject:

“[…] In the first case, construction has taken the place of a godlike agency which not only causes but composes everything which is its object; it is the divine performative, bringing into being and exhaustively constituting that which it names, or, rather, it is that kind of transitive referring which names and inaugurates at once. For something to be constructed, according to this view of construction, is for it to be created and determined through that process.”

I do not know how I name this figure but I suppose it is indeed created and determined through my computational process of skeleton tracking.

Despite it being constructed, it seems not to have a direction. No spatial direction. No gender direction. No mental direction. And the few times it chooses to follow a messy direction, it is probably opposed to mine. A disobedient skeleton which was constructed under the purpose to be obedient. It might be due to the brightness of the video or another technical issue but for now, I find it charming to generate this behaviour on a sticky figure.

Posenet is an algorithm for single or multiple pose estimation while detecting a person or multiple persons in an image or video. It is a model that I am currently experimenting with while I want to use it with machine learning for choreographic generation. I am intrigued by the way this sticky figure has a human background but no human interface. It has a purely geometrical schema with no texture. Blue lines and red dots.

Is it not a subject (yet)?

“This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which - and by virtue of which- the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.”

I enjoy giving rise to such abjects as a way of empowering and inheriting the improvisational spirit to someone. Just like the choreographic score I coded some months ago where other sticky figures where moving driven by ofNoise( ):

References:

Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of sex, Routledge New York & London

[iriniasvisual-blog]

I want to situate bodies in a choreo-milieu

It is where and when the mutual affective encounter emerges. Agential realism.

It is where and when bodies and environments dance. 

It is where and when dance calls for intra-action with/in/within the dynamic nature of bodies/things.

It is where and when I am reminded of the ancient greek Chorus as the primitive dance figuration.

following this path of ancient greek tragedy:

It is where and when metamorphosis emerges.

therefore:

It is where and when feminist theoretical practise needs to be located.

It is where and when (body) stories change and “stories must change”, as I heard Donna Haraway mention yesterday.

The choreo-milieu is where and when bodies and body parts, inner and outer ones, are experiencing the being and are experienced as performative spacetimematter. In the giddiness of my amateur research, I am seeking for this new choreo-related term to form my thoughts before I find the thoughts to form the new term.

Why do I have this need for a terminological dislocation? What is wrong with the current state of choreography? What am I arguing against? How is choreography figured in feminist technoscience and in which ways it is limited?

“When technoscience looks at embodied practices like dance, it follows its usual approach of reduction and division: It sees bodies and body parts, heart rates and brainwave patterns, muscles and tendons, statistics and other quantitative measures. This is very different from what social epistemology sees when it looks at embodied practice. Social epistemology (Schatzki et al. 2001) studies how practice is structured by knowledge. When it looks at dances and dancers, it sees styles and schools, practices and techniques, social processes of transmission and innovation, invented traditions and traditions of invention. Above all, social epistemology sees dances and dancers as epistemic, as knowable but never fully known, constantly unfolding. Rather than trying to pin down a dance, social epistemology treats it as a field of knowledge that increases rather than decreases in complexity the more we study it. A social epistemology of dance would examine the objects that interest dancers rather than those that interest scientists. It would do so in a way that brings a particular kind of rigor to those objects, accounting for both their corporeality — what social epistemology calls realism — and their social construction.”

References:

Spatz, Ben (2017) Choreography as Research: Iteration, Object, Context. In: Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader (2nd ed.). Routledge, London, UK

Karen, Michelle, Barad (2007) Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham : Duke University Press

[iriniasvisual-blog]

a VISCERAL scene

It is early morning.

It is always early morning.

In such a way that time cannot be visually tracked and followed. In such a way that time is gambled and relational. 

The fact that she mentions it is morning, is a superfluous information.

Reversing the timely recent writing, she never mentions that it is early morning.

It is what the body suggests. 

The body is fuelled with energy and plasticity. Accordingly, it must be early morning. 

“Plasticity”, she repeats, “not elasticity”. 

The body is far from elastic, even during the early morning hours.

It is plastic. It maintains all the scars and marks and malformations and pains and colours and sounds that attacked it just the morning before. 

Compact as matter and experience, it tries to sayshape something. 

She can recognise its effort to talk. 

Whenever it spreads out by folding in, it clearly sayshapes something. 

Pure struggle.

It is hugging itself in the most unorthodox way. It is growing within by shrinking externally. 

It swallows and generates space. 

And she is just observing the morning alien body as if it is her body. 

The body is the one doing the research and she is the one wondering how it would be to sleep in the dark. 

The body is changing schemata, sizes, postures, timing, clothes, meanings.

She is changing perceptions.

The body is going quicker.

She is turning around it, getting dizzy by its speed. The morning sun is disorientating her while shooting in the eye.

She is feeling the fatigue that only a body could feel.

How can it be?

                                                                                     while listening to cinematic orchestra, as if my research is a cinematic morning scene

[iriniasvisual-blog]

She found the action of Turning

Monika Jaeckel found the action of Turning as a bodily (dancing) equivalent to S. Ahmed’s definition of dis/orientating and K. Barad’s proposal for hauntological im/possibilities. Turning as a source, cause and effect of different orientation, is the way Jaeckel formalised something that is not choreography but is a choreographic system to model her world.

Reading through her paper for Transartfest, Trans-what Symposium in Berlin 2013, I notice that she brings attention to the way direction is shaping the spatial perceptions that come to matter. Along with her referenced L. Chétouane’s movement praxis that is orientated towards “a concept of the space as looking at you, not vice versa”, she develops a view on the situatedness of the body in space as following directions and creating directions (binding cause and effect) by repeating norms, conventions, bodily inheritances. Repeating norms, conventions, bodily inheritances. Repeating norms, conventions, bodily inheritances.

Repetition as an action of the body, leads to the most direct and conspicuous transition from doing to being/becoming. When you are told (e.g. from a choreographer) to continuously pinch your left ear with your left hand, you gradually become this action of pinching the ear with your left hand. The instruction is slowly vanishing. The route that your hand follows is getting blurry and unimportant. The agency of the choreographer is fading out and a solid agency of the body in space is emerging. This is a change of matter occurring through the iterative (re)openings of responsiveness when moving recursively. It is not the repetition of a certain movement that causes that. The repetition is just proving this event in the most linear way. But the iterative (re)openings of responsiveness could be actually present in every differentiated bodily path and this is a way I could imagine a choreographic phrase evolving.

Through Jaeckel’s eyes, both Ahmed and Barad understand movement as “a dis/location in the sense of a certain locality of non-locality that marks the in/stability of a system’s homeostasis”. And she continues: “Nevertheless Ahmed and Barad orientate towards each other by way of their interest to excavate the other (thing/body; non-human/human) in the spectrum of nature’s hauntological im/possibilities that, according to Barad’s outline, are not restricted to solely operate within the confines of a superimposing of human values onto the ontology of the world. And one that in Ahmed’s sense allows an orientation towards those queer moments where a slipping object can appear and have it pass through, in the unknowable length of its duration.”

What will be my bodily equivalent to this dis/location (if I need one)?

Leaning, bending, opening, stretching, attacking, contracting, releasing, jumping . . . . . . 

Continuously present verbs/actions/states of matter.

References:

Monika Jaeckel, in collaboration with Yuko Matsuyama, Transartfest, Trans-what Symposium , “Turn around, make a round turn - Thinking around the transpositional options of movement”, Berlin 2013

[iriniasvisual-blog]

what is my question

Maybe I don’t have a specific question to ask and my research is a research of this question. Luke encouraged me towards this direction and it is of a Lacanian value to get recognition by the other. 

I am in a field of interest. I nearly want to cry from excitement when I embody this being in this field of interest. It feels like I might discover something (a question) any time soon. Life is “too much” to search for/find answers. But it is experienced as amazingly harmonic when intra-acting with/within the other(s), when moving dynamically, when moving. This is why I deeply appreciate dance as a poetic and poietic equivalent of life. This is how dance matters to me. This is how dance matters.

I fled from the Hatchlab and lied down on the floor of St James’ main space. Sometimes I believe that I have trained myself in needing a studio in order to spread the body out and therefore spread the thoughts out. So there they come, arbitrary and impetuous. 

Thinking of the discursive-material practises that Karen Barad suggests and while being obviously biased by my dancing background, I cannot avoid linking dance and especially improvisational rather than choreographed/structured dance to such practises. Isn’t bodily improvisation a dynamic entanglement of the relational natures of space, time and matter; of object and apparatus? I am in the process of temporarily quitting the choreographic perspective I insisted on having till now, since I realise that choreography treats itself and the bodies as two separate entities and that confuses me. I want to free myself from seeing and using a medium in order to recognise the spatial and historical continuity of matter. I need to stop splitting notions, objects, subjects and situations into segments.

Choreography as it is, might be a segment of a process that needs to be united. Choreography as a word that manipulates things/bodies is disappointing. While a post-choreography as a word and thing might propose something greater. Personal apocalypse in process.

[iriniasvisual-blog]

performative performance why perform

Quoting Peggy Phelan’s extracts from her book: “Unmarked, the politics of performance”

chapter 7: “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction”

“Performance’s only life is in the present.”

“To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.”

“Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again but this repetition itself marks it as “different”. The document of the performance then is only a spur of memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.”

“[…] the interaction between the art object and the spectator is, essentially, performative”

“[…] performance in a strict ontological sense is non-reproductive”

“Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing sector must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plugs into visibility - in a maniacally charged present - and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends.”

“[…] performance critics realise that the labor to write about performance (and thus to “preserve” it) is also a labor that fundamentally alters the event.”

                                                          I am afraid that the last statements are made on the pre-assumption that performance is a medium between a performative meaning and the performed artefact, as two separate entities. Even if Phelan attempts to approach performance’s ontology as non-reproducible, the notion of representation is enough to destroy the materiality of performance in its fullness. It splits it in meaning and matter. Meaning that can be represented and matter that cannot be reproduced.

“The distinction between performative and constative utterances was proposed by J. L. Austin in “How To Do Things With Words”. Austin argued that speech had both a constative element (describing things in the world) and a performative element (to say something is to do or make something, e.g. “i promise”, “i bet”, “i beg”).”

“For Derrida, performative writing promises fidelity only to the utterance of the promise: I promise to utter the promise. The performative is important to Derrida precisely because it displays language’s independence from the referent outside itself.Thus, for Derrida the performative enacts the now of writing in the present time.”

“Performance uses the performer’s body to pose a question about the inability to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body per se; performance uses the body to frame the lack of being promised by and through the body - that which cannot appear without a supplement.”

                                                                 I am facing a problem of accepting the used words with their semiotic extensions here. I would imagine that performance is not “using” a body but “is” the body and the apparatus emerging within the relative duration of the event. I need to have a further reading of Karen Barad’s writings. Not all performances are performative, she argues, so maybe I should clear up the differentiation between performance and the notion of performative.

References:

Phelan, Peggy, 1993, “UNMARKED, the politics of performance”, Routledge, London

Barad, Karen, 2003, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2003 The University of Chicago

[iriniasvisual-blog]

Matter

Since body matter matters to me and will probably be the theoretical core of my artefact, I dive into Karen Barad’s views on matter in her philosophically rich, epistemological framework of “agential realism”.

Similar to Donna Haraway’s critique on “antagonistic dualisms”, Barad and “agential realism” call into question the set of dualisms that places nature on one side and culture on the other. She suggests that matter and meaning are entangled. 

“Matter and meaning are always immanently enfolded and transitional.”

Matters of fact, matters of concern and matters of care should not be considered separate and be divided into discrete academic fields of science and/versus humanities. Science and Culture are in a constant interaction, or to be more consistent with Barad’s thesis, they are in a constant intra-action. That is to say that objects and agencies are always emerging while being with each other and mutually responding to each other, suggesting a new understanding of causality. From this exact responsive behaviour, derives objectivity. Objectivity is a matter of responsibility and not a matter of distance which many would argue.

Following Bohr’s epistemological and ontological researches on the matter of the electron, Karen Barad builds on the feminist theory that the object (i.e. the electron) and the apparatus consist the phenomenon, the entanglement, the relation of inseparability to be observed. The electron is changing depending upon the way it is measured. “The properties that we measure are not attributable to independent objects. Independent objects are abstract notions. […] ontology changes when we change the apparatus is of no surprise, because we are investigating an entirely different phenomenon. […] there are no things before the measurement and the very act of measurement produces determinate boundaries and properties of things.”

Matter makes itself. Matter is born when measured, when it is asking for/receiving a response, when it intra-acts with its apparatus. “Matter is a dynamic expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming. All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity, its performativity.”

Discursive practises are related directly to material phenomena and this makes me feel confident that bodily phenomena, dancing phenomena, dynamically moving phenomena do not simply carry a meaning but are a mattermeaning per se to be read and experienced. Body research is a theory-based research. Body is to theory what matter is to meaning. A wave (and a particle). A diffraction, as a “metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness” (Donna Haraway).

                 diffraction patterns - the patterns of difference that make a difference

References:

Karen, Michelle Barad, 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press

Intra-active entanglements: an interview with Karen Barad by Malou Juelskjaer and Nete Schwennesen, 2012

Interview with Karen Barad, “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”, 7th European Feminist Research Conference, 2009

[iriniasvisual-blog]

chaotic

What if my research is a coordination of thoughts analogue to the coordination of body parts? What if my theory research could draw on body research? What would be the analogies in terms of the used methodology and the gained experience? 

If I was starting a body research I would spend x (*infinity) hours in an empty studio, probably alone, warming-up my body, stretching my muscles, walking around, jumping around, raising the adrenaline levels, increasing the heart rate, fatiguing myself until the certain point when I would no longer move from the conscious and decisive part of my mind but from my body’s impulse. I would reach this point when I would bodily/mentally trust and positively experience my “being” in the room. It is at this exact climactic moment that new movements are generated, new schemata are discovered, a new kinaesthetic is revealed. And I faithfully seek for such generative moments.

// Is the computer an already tired body improvising?

I have submitted a proposal for my theory-based research project which means that I have partly formed a mind path towards an artefact or an artefact towards a research. But no. My proposal is a blurry assemblage of bridging thoughts between post-phenomenology and choreography. And this is a verification post for my current chaos.

I need to choose. I need to peak a focus area. For now, I know that I am attracted to the body; its materiality, its schema, its functionality, its (dis)abilities, its moving behaviour, its configurations, its liveness, its fleshy nature, its humanness, its artificiality, its universality, its vagueness, its harmony.

Bach's Partita no1 in B-Flat Major, BWV 825: VI.Giga as a sound environment in repeat has drastically biased my thoughts towards this last quest for harmony.

[iriniasvisual-blog]

Touch

I am touching the TouchOsc tray icon in order to bring my phone in touch with Max/Msp. I am then touching my curls as a subconscious distress gesture. My curls though, touch my shoulders constantly as a gravity effect. I am touched by such poetic dimensions of physics. And meanwhile I have touched the “ i a m t o u c h n g s p l r d e y x f w “ buttons of the laptop in a semiotically meaningful sequence with silent and delicate movements of my touchy fingertips. 

come on come on come on come on

now touch me, babe

can’t you see that I am not afraid?

In a purely rock and clearly non-academic approach, The Doors suggest that since I am not afraid, I can welcome the touch. I touch what I trust and let myself be touched by what I fear not. 

When I think of touch, I feel like I am touching my sensory neurons from every possible angle, surface and tip and I instantly become overloaded by mentally tactile stimuli. It is such an occupying sense even to think of. It is a spreading extension of the body. It defines flesh’s physical borders and at the same time it overrides them. By the time I touch, I unite, therefore I grow, therefore I shape a greater body space, therefore I gain more or different capacities, therefore I become generative (art). Arbitrary but pleasing linkages.

                                                                               in the meantime, being with Π

If I could, if I was socially permitted and not targeted as invasive or provocative, I would literally touch people and objects to an extent of an almost religious sought for oneness and universalism. Wherefore isn’t touch the method of encountering in the universal milieu? And isn’t it sad to not be aware of or even renounce this cosmic touch? Quoting the feminist Killjoy Sarah Ahmed: “universalism becomes melancholic when you are required to identify with the very promise that you fail to embody”. Isn’t a failure of touch prior or synchronous to this failure of embodiment? And indeed, doesn’t that lead to a melancholy of not connecting, not understanding, not belonging? “In times of binding technosciences with naturecultures, the livelihoods and fates of so many kinds and entities on this planet are unavoidably entagled” Maria Puig de la Bellacasa mentions and I am speculating that touch is the most direct way of accepting this entanglement. And by saying “accepting”, I visualise a net of symbolic arms receiving and offering care; not as “a warm affection or a moralistic fell-good attitude” but as “everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world […] The world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto, 1993).

References:

Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 2017, “Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds”, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis London

Ahmed, Sara, et al. 2017, “Archipelago #4: Melancholia”, PSS

[iriniasvisual-blog]

I propose

a techno - choreo project

What is the overarching area of research?

In an attempt to approach the contemporary, material body (both the animate and inanimate), I need to analyse it to its fundamental components: form, space and temporality. Accordingly, the overarching areas of research include the post-phenomenological approach to body’s materiality (plasticity, schema), the embodied cognition and control in human-computer interactions (dynamic relations, fluidity, movement) and the milieu of this encounter (space and time). 

The intention is to research these areas through a choreographic scope which will focus on the bodily structures and relations that emerge in a performative milieu.

What are the key questions or queries you will address?

How does the living body alternate with a physical-computed body within a living continuity? Is this transition a glitch of reality or a harmonic succession of two versions of the same essence? How does the plasticity of the present body define/affect its performativity? How does the different plasticity retail different interactions with the audience?

Why are you motivated to undertake this project?

I am essentially interested in the body as a material structure which moves/functions spontaneously or orchestrated but either way choreographically. I think that the perception of the body as plastic and therefore as a material that “retains the trails of its deformation” equates somehow the living (animate) and the computed (inanimate?) versions of it in the notion of a post-body. I want to explore the analogies and the relations that emerge between the two.

What theoretical frameworks will you use in your work to guide you?

Material-Semiotics and Post-Phenomenology are the two main theoretical frameworks of my research, with which I aim to approach the body as a material of a certain plasticity, schema and behaviour.

What theoretical frameworks will you use in the analysis of your project?

HCI and the theory of Liveness and Performance are the two frameworks which will help me in the process of injecting my research into my artefact. 

How will you document your project?

I will try to structure my theoretical research of the materiality of the body with a parallel choreographic composition of a performance (live or recorded). This performance should consist of an actual presentation of the research, by the two bodies of research: the living one and the physical-computed one. They will literally, verbally and bodily, present their being-in-the-world. The space “between” should reflect a milieu, their interaction should respond to the embodied control one applies to the other, their bodily kinaesthetics should reveal their individual materiality.

Timeline for project milestones

(11 weeks)

25/02 - 03/03 : research on the theoretical frameworks of my work (plasticity)

04/03 - 10/03 : research on the theoretical frameworks of my work (embodied control as choreography)

11/03 - 17/03 : research on the theoretical frameworks of my work (milieu)

18/03 - 24/03 : research on the theoretical frameworks of my work (agency)

25/03 - 31/03 : research on the theoretical frameworks of my work (auditory-visual expressive speech and gesture)

01/04 - 07/04 : writing the paper

08/04 - 14/04 : writing the paper

15/04 - 21/04 : building the physical computing components of the performance

22/04 - 28/04 : OFFF Festival (break) -  refining the paper

29/04 - 05/05 : composing the performance (speech and movements)

06/05 - 12/05 : finalising the paper and the performance

Budget (if any)

_ for sensors (probably Kinect) and the rest physical-computing equipment

                                                                                in the meantime, being with Π

Annotated Bibliography

For the purposes of my annotated bibliography, I choose three characteristic references, one for each component of my developing research idea: the post-phenomenological body, the HCI through a choreographic scope, the milieu between two bodies.

Sparrow, Tom. Plastic bodies: Rebuilding sensation after phenomenology. Open Humanities Press, 2014.

In his book “Plastic bodies: Rebuilding sensation after phenomenology”, Tom Sparrows responds to the transcendental phenomenological approach to the body with a post-phenomenological approach that views the body as plastic. The writer indicates a need to rethink the essence of the materiality of the body. In this process, he analysis Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’ thesis on embodiment and goes a step further. There is no given or a priori spatial body. There is the body that acquires its temporal space and reforms this space “within the general realm of extension”. But in addition to its spatial dimension, the body has material properties that need to be distinguished from their functionality: the future of the flesh. “How can we conceive of matter without reverting to mechanism? In order to properly distinguish matter from mechanism, we will call this post-phenomenological materiality plasticity. Plasticity is thus defined as that which comes after the flesh.“ It is a generalized disposition of material bodies.

Sensation is the key to this process of re-materialization of the body after the preceded de-materialization which accompanied phenomenology’s attempt to de-objectify the body. The body, as the subject, is produced by a set of perspectives provided from the environment of aesthetic stimuli and is sent back to this environment of stimuli. “The body’s senses hold a power of their own” that determine its schema and its plasticity.

There is a clear distinction between plasticity and elasticity. Plasticity inhibits the reversibility of the body, therefore the absolute healing of the injured body, therefore the return to the integrity of an original form. But, there is a vitality and a generative aspect to this plasticity. The plastic material “retains the trail of its deformation” in a way that gives birth to new forms, new schemata. Plasticity is directly linked to the schema of the body. Catherine Malabou, who writes the foreword of the book, defines plasticity as the capacity to change by continuing to function as a total organism. She also claims that plasticity entails a detonation of form, an explosiveness that “transforms nature into freedom”.

Considering my interest in the contemporary body as a fleshy, dynamic, susceptible and interactive material, I am attracted by Sparrow’s analysis of the post-phenomenological body. I am my body, I am what my body performs and what my bodily kinaesthetics reveal. If my body has the qualities of the plastic material, I would like to research how it forms and reforms its schema through the time and how this is applied to both the animate and the inanimate body. I am also wondering if the trained dancing body, which has acquired the capacity of taking a greater number of extreme schemata, is approaching the explosiveness that Malabou mentions.

Tuuri, Kai. Parviainen, Jaana. Pirhonen, Antti. Who controls who? Embodied control within human - technology choreographies. Oxford University Press, 2017.

In this paper, the researchers explore the embodiment relations that emerge between current technologies and the moving body. They treat movements as “lived experiences that constitute humans as embodied beings” and they focus on the intentional (or not) choreographies humans engage with in everyday life. Unlike the dance field, the choreographies of this sort do not follow any choreographer’s instructions - rather, they are led dynamically by human and non-human agents.

Starting by describing the prevailing concept of using the body and its physical movement with an instrumental intention (user to device control-scheme), the paper turns its attention to the phenomenological understanding of human - computer interaction (HCI)  in a choreographic context:

“How discrete movements belong to a bigger whole of both spontaneous and orchestrated/arranged movements […] how these choreographies differ across time and places […] how movement and space are lived through by subjects (individual choreographies), and among subjects belonging a cultural community (social choreographies).”

Analysing these ways of “choreographing” as an assistive method of approaching HCI, the paper distinguishes three types of embodied control in relation to interaction design: a) The instrumental control, where the body (its gestures and movements) is the instrument in control. b) The experiential control, where the body is experiencing both push and pull effects, both being controlled and being in control. c) The infrastructural control, where the body is controlled by the material and immaterial infrastructures of its lived space.

Considering this categorisation, technological artefacts are experienced as extensions of the human cognition and organism, sometimes as energetic controllers, other times as passive objects but always as present bodies in a milieu of interactions. I am very interested in researching the way in which the technological devices, the Kinect or any other potential sensor I will use, could be sensed as an extension of my body, like Marshall McLuhan has suggested. I am also essentially enchanted by the way choreography is used, even theoretically, as a method of reading and analysing the embodied interactions. It is an approach that I would like to use as well, while observing the relations that will unavoidably emerge between a body and a technological artefact. “Choreographies provide a concrete way to handle embodied temporality in HCI and they can be flexibly applied to both objective and subjective perspectives of investigation”.

This paper follows harmonically the post-phenomenological approach of the body, only now, it focuses more on its moving behaviour than on its materiality and schema.

Ganguilhem, Georges. The living and its milieu. Grey Room, Inc and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001.

In his lecture and later publication “The living and its milieu”, Georges Canguilhem analyses the notion of milieu in a scientific and philosophical way. He firstly introduces the term as a universal means of experiencing life and thinking of life.

Following Newton’s problematics on this matter, Canguilhem elicits an absolute meaning of the term: the “between” two centres. “The fluid (relative to ether) is the intermediary between two bodies; it is their milieu; and to the extent that it penetrates these bodies, they are situated within it.” Passing through perceptions of Lamarck, Buffon, Comte, Darwin, Ritter, Humboldt, Watson, Weiss and correspondingly through the disciplines of biology, geography, mathematics, psychology, physics, all adding to the meaning of milieu, Canguilhem mentions that the behavioural, the geographical and the physical milieu coincide with each other.

I am intrigued by the way Canguilhem’s living thing (man) is becoming a “creator of the geographical configuration” which allows me to think of it (him) as a geographical and spatial factor; a relation that can be directly translated into dance terms. In every choreographic approach I need to define the space along with the form and the temporality of the bodily behaviours. The milieu as the world of a man’s mental and physical perception, is the space between bodies and body parts; it is the space “between” that exists even within the living body and is also (re)generated from this body. 

Having this publication as a reference in my research of the body, encourages me to see a dynamic, moving duet between the milieu and the living thing.

References:

Bene, Andrea, et al. Languages for Augmented Choreography. 2012, p. 6.

Canguilhem, Georges. ‘The Living and Its Milieu’. Grey Room, translated by John Savage, vol. 3, Mar. 2001, pp. 7–31. Crossref, doi:10.1162/152638101300138521.

Gotsis, Marientina. Conceptualizing the EnergyComposer: Interactive Choreography and Performance Using Software and Motion Tracking Systems. p. 12.

Kim, Jeesun, et al. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue on Auditory-Visual Expressive Speech and Gesture in Humans and Machines’. Speech Communication, vol. 98, Apr. 2018, pp. 63–67. Crossref, doi:10.1016/j.specom.2018.02.001.

McLuhan, Marshall, ‘Understanding Media, The extensions of man’. McGraw-Hill, 1964

Paolo, Ezequiel Di. ‘Gilbert Simondon and the Enactive Conception of Life and Mind’. Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2016, MIT Press, 2016, pp. 14–14. Crossref, doi:10.7551/978-0-262-33936-0-ch002.

Sparrow, Tom. Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology. Open Humanities Press, 2015.

https://www.roadtovr.com/why-have-2-arms-when-you-could-have-3-stanford-studies-control-schemes-for-three-armed-avatars-in-vr/

http://twentyeight.fibreculturejournal.org/2016/12/22/fcj-203-introduction-creative-robotics-rethinking-human-machine-configurations/

http://percaritatem.com/2009/02/18/fanon-merleau-ponty-and-the-difference-of-phenomenology/

[iriniasvisual-blog]

A pictorial language

751 emojis according to the sentiment lexicon, called Emoji Sentiment Ranking.

Emojis for facial expressions.

Emojis for facial features.

Emojis for body features.

Emojis for body postures.

Emojis for gestures.

Emojis for emotions.

Emojis for clothes.

Emojis for professions.

Emojis for food.

Emojis for beverages.

Emojis for sexual identities.

Emojis for love.

Emojis for sport activities.

Emojis for artistic practises.

Emojis for animals.

Emojis for plants.

Emojis for other natural elements.

Emojis for weather.

Emojis for games.

Emojis for vehicles.

Emojis for regions.

Emojis for sceneries.

Emojis for religious buildings.

Emojis for love.

Emojis for technology.

Emojis for objects.

Emojis for time.

Emojis for tools.

Emojis for science.

Emojis for hygiene.

Emojis for home.

Emojis for mails.

Emojis for stationary.

Emojis for privacy.

Emojis for love.

Emojis for love.

Emojis for love.

Emojis for star signs.

Emojis for bans.

Emojis for caution.

Emojis for labels.

Emojis for numbers.

Emojis for calculations.

Emojis for directions.

Emojis for music.

Emojis for sound.

Emojis for shapes.

Emojis for colours.

Emojis for playing cards.

Emojis for time.

Emojis for nations.

I scrolled across all the emojis’ panel and tried to discern the categories each one appertains to. 

So these are the chapters of one’s life, according to the creator Shigetaka Kurita and the universal approval. Or at least, these are the chapters one would want to communicate pictorially with a distant discussant. It is a big but still limited, numerical list;  a list that defines the image and the materiality of the transmitted/perceived emotions and situations in 751 very specific ways.

I admit that emojis add texture to a written conversation. They add qualities of speech, intonation, emphasis, stress, hue e.t.c. They “appear to have a useful role in either controlling a conversational thread or in encouraging playful behaviour.” But there is something uncomfortable about sharing them as a code of communication with the whole universe. Visualising happiness the same way anyone would (with a happy emoji), deprives me of shaping a different face for all the different people I communicate with. Sending a heart instead of texting love or thanksgiving or affinity or passion, deprives me of understanding the actual feeling. We see each other as if we are all coloured yellow and love unconditionally everyone.

There is a pursuit of speed and practicality but isn’t it happening to the detriment of being present and conscious and personal with/in the process of communicating? I am questioning whether emojis add to the language or substitute for it. The texture they used to implement in the writing has become so neutralised and common that is now absorbed by their own materiality.

References:

Ryan, Kelly, Leon, Watts, 2019, “Characterising the Inventive Appropriation of Emoji as Relationally Meaningful in Mediated Close Personal Relationships”, Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom

Petra, Kralj Novak, Jasmina, Smailović, Borut, Sluban, Igor, Mozetič, Jožef, Stefan, 2015, “Sentiment of Emojis”, Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia 

                                                                                in the meantime, being with Π

[iriniasvisual-blog]

Curating the subject before it turns to an object

When my readings are coincidentally intersecting, I know that I will pass through one crossroad during the day. 

I had just left aside Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” to read an article from Boris Groys “Curating in the Post-Internet Age” where he quotes Heidegger, driving me in an interesting inception:

“Martin Heidegger writes in his “Origin of the Work of Art: “When a work is brought into collection or placed in an exhibition, we say also that it is “set up”. But this setting up differs essentially from setting up as erecting a building, raising a statue, presenting a tragedy at a holy festival.” Heidegger differentiates again between an artwork inscribed into a certain historical and/or ritual space and time, and an artwork that is merely exhibited at a certain place but removable, thus without context.” 

So far I have mostly presented my work in the context of a live performance both from the perspective of the dancer and the perspective of the choreographer. Liveness has always been curating my works in a way that “setting up” meant adapting to the host environment, either it is a small stage or Epidaurus ancient theatre, either a gallery or an urban exterior scenery. In (my) dance, space is one of the essential elements of the creation, along with time and form. It is predefined in the early stages of conceiving the idea in order to give substance to a ritual, as Boris Groys mentions. My few experiences of reproducing a work in different spacial frames involve “transferring” the work to different stages which are more or less alike. Black boxes or white cubes. Neutral colours and dimensions in order to let the work’s aura be reborn by the people. False alarm. I presume that this occasion falls within the scope of “setting up” in different contexts, therefore having no context.

“…in his later writing, Heidegger begins to stress the technological, artificial character of our relation to the world. For Heidegger, the subject does not have an ontologically guaranteed outside position vis-a-vis the world. Rather, his position is artificially constructed by modern technology. Technology creates the framing, or Gestell (apparatus) that allows one to position as a subject and experience the world as an object, as an image. This framing defines our relationship to our environment, and invisibly guides our experiences of it. However, as Heidegger describes, this apparatus remains concealed from us because it opens the world to our gaze as something that is familiar, “natural”. ��

Magnificent!

I am firstly wondering if the terms “apparatus” and “milieu” are describing the same spacial idea as I am fascinated by both of them and secondly I am trying to visualise my position outside the familiar frame /slash/ world. I am nothing outside the frame. Neither a subject nor an object. How then, would my creations, my products, my offsprings be something outside a frame, an environment, a technology? “Experience the world as an object, as an image”. The subject chooses a position within its technological apparatus and its given time and then it observes as an object. Its experiences are defines by the position it chose because it only sees fragments of the whole. It doesn’t have a panoramic view of the apparatus. It gazes at it from within. 

                                                                           in the meantime, being with Πs

Last week, we, the MA/MFA Comp Art students, set up our computational artworks as part of the pop-up exhibition “getLerped”. There, I exhibited works which were made during the first term of the MA. When made, there was no intention for them to be exhibited. I was constructing them in an effort to apply the new knowledge. I was experimenting while incorporating the computational “tricks”. I was framing a discreet and fearful dance content in an outspread computational context. It was a challenge to think beyond the human within a specific space and time and instead, approach the idea of object-oriented ontology. I was creating something removable and timeless, yet dynamic and interactive in a way I have never thought before. According to Heidegger, all beings are objects (πράγμα = res = ens = ον) and therefore I should experience similarly the process of presenting a choreography to the process of presenting a printed choreographic score. Shouldn’t I?

References:

Heidegger,  Martin, 1950, “Origin of the Work of Art”

Groys, Boris, 2018 “Curating in the Post-Internet Age”, e-flux journal #94

[iriniasvisual-blog]

SeNsinG a milieu

After five months of wandering within the territory of generative arts and while I have given myself the identity of a choreographer, I just managed to comprehend the harmony between me and my current environment, as a dynamic entity. I was wondering how dance is connected to generative arts, what essence they are both sharing, how I passed from one art-form to the other on impulse and in ignorance of my inner reasons. And then I encountered in my readings and discussions the topic of sensing (in) a milieu.

Analogising the practise of environmental sensing as described in the “Program Earth, Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet” by Jennifer Gabrys, to my personal practise of sensing the generative ground, I realised that I was monitoring my being in this environment with wrong measurements.

“Monitoring as a practise of sensing, raises questions about who or what is undertaking sensing practises, how this in-forms the counts as “sense” and what types of milieus concretise in the process. Does monitoring in some way already prosuppose a certain set of practises that assume distinct ways of accessing and studying environmental phenomena?”

Till now I was trying to sense and connect two things, the art of moving and the art of generating, as if they are primarily separate and independent and as if I am floating between two milieus, stretching my arms in two different directions until I touch them and bring them together. I was trying to measure the affinity of the two, based on practises that relied on my previous limited experiences in monitoring and sensing “environments”. 

And now that I am not touching anything, I realise there is actually nothing to touch and nothing to connect. It is one uniform sphere, one milieu of the same texture, of the same liquidity all over its range and I am already in it. It is the milieu with which and within which I am trying to create, to give birth, to make poetry, to live.

“Conceptualising a milieu by acting with it and in it is an experiment with a stake, a conceptualising channeled through form and matter that thereby ventures out, becoming both exploratory and generative” as posed by Helen Pritchard.

                                                                             in the meantime, being with Π

Dance is generative and generative art is moving. What was suggested in philosophy since the era of ancient Greece, is now applied in technology with the generative means. We have never been practically so close to our organic nature as we are now: constant change and movement. Nothing we produce is static. No object or body is passive - rather it is in a collaborative process with its environment.

While writing this post, I stood up five times, made twenty push-ups, did some laundry, threw away three objects I don’t want to interact with anymore and chose one coat to send back home. Actions that reflect my dependence on body and bodies/objects. I explore generative art, I choose the objects that surround me and I compose movement for the exact same reasons: to shape life, to deal with liveness, to reform energy, to change, to resemble nature, to incorporate nature.

References:

Garbys, Jennifer, 2016, “Program Earth, Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet”, Electronics Mediations 49, University of Minnesota Press, London

[iriniasvisual-blog]

overdue by time and distance

a delayed post / one that is plaguing me as it involves cruelty and ignorance / how do I witness witnessing in conflict zones

Occasionally, my mind and its spinal extension follow a capricious pattern that knocks me out of life in unexpected circumstances. They give me pain and force me to lie down, to shrink, to isolate myself. It feels like being pulled to a distant and well insulated place which cannot be reached by sounds or colours or moving particles. Only based on my memories, I make the assumption that music and trees and healthy bodies actually still exist.

Back pain. Harsh and sheer. 

                                                                              in the meantime,  being with Π

While being immobilised in bed, what I witness through digital media and video reproductions is not enough for me to feel involved and aware of what I am not physically experiencing even if it is my familiar and predictable life routine. In a larger and more terrifying scale, how could digital narratives in conflict zones be descriptive enough or accurate enough or vivid enough or personal enough to convince me that I am actually a witness? How do I perceive what I am not experiencing now and never had experienced before? How do I understand without enacting? “Enaction is the idea that organisms create their own experience through their actions. Organisms are not passive receivers of input from the environment, but are actors in the environment such that what they experience is shaped by how they act” (Edwin Hutchins 1996). Considering that, the digital visual input cannot be enough for one to experience, thus make valid assumptions on a distant suffering. Instead, it resembles more to a cinematic narrative or a performative practise, “a practice of representation that re-constitutes mediatized death* as an authentic event worthy of “our” emotion at the moment that it claims to simply re-disseminate it” (Chouliaraki 2013). In this case of performing or documenting the distant facts, a wide audience, the Western world, gets the “right to look” at them (Mizroeff 2011) as a provision of the regime of digital democratization. Having no guarantee for truth. No guarantee for authenticity. Only the illusion of seeing a well-framed whole picture. Subjective perspectives and fragmental data, chosen by an authority.

Hard to see without recruiting all of the body’s senses in the witnessing process. 

*recorded death, especially with amateur media

References: 

Hutchins, Edwin, 1996. Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press

Awan, Nishat, 2016. Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance. GeoHumanities

Chouliaraki, Lilie, 2015. Digital witnessing in conflict zones: the politics of remediation. LS

[iriniasvisual-blog]

Capacious Subway

_ creating a disobedient electronics in response to politics arising from entering the tube station:

It is a synthetic coat. 

It is a transformer. 

It can be found in two states:

I  ]  shrunk, rough and dark colored when it is worn overground

II ]  inflated, sleek and pale colored when it is worn underground

“Capacious Subway” has a barometric pressure/temperature sensor hidden under its collar that is used as an altimeter (since pressure changes with altitude). This sensor is connected with a pump attached inside the coat. When the sensor perceives pressure values that indicate gradual altitude decrement (descending tube stairs), the pump inflates the coat until it becomes rounded, stretched and gains the power to lift slightly the body. The user becomes almost weightless and the puffed coat offers him a greater diameter of occupied private space. Correspondingly, when the sensor perceives values that indicate gradual altitude increment (ascending tube stairs), the pump shrinks the coat until it reaches its ordinary thickness and color.

As a disobedient electronics, “Capacious Subway” is commenting on the process of entering the tube station. This process which is being governed by the TFL-authority, defines the somatic and mental state of all passengers. Pre-decided spatial conditions of the subway station are inevitably translated into pre-decided physical conditions of the subway users. Stairs forcing passengers to descend; narrow public spaces, divided into narrow private spaces, suppressing passengers’ free movement; dark colored industrial surfaces triggering mental states of oppression and heaviness. In response to these phenomena, “Capacious Subway” calls attention to the functional subway architecture which is based on manufacturing techniques that seemingly ignore people’s fundamental /slash/ mental needs.

TFL-authority has considerable responsibility for people’s mental health. “If people live in healthy spaces within an environment designed to suit their nature, it has a positive effect on their vital functions. Evidence of how this is reflected in their mental state can be seen in times of stress.” But since the subway space does not change, “Capacious Subway” changes the position of the passenger in it. It lifts him up. It enlarges him. It encourages and facilitates new and/or more forms of movement. It does not obey to gravity rules and therefore to any spatial rules. It might be challenging and inconvenient even for the user. It is designed to provide him with essential sensory stimulation. It suggests a new way of experiencing the process of entering the tube station. 

While bringing into mind forgotten values of playfulness and effort for the mechanical action of taking the subway, “Capacious Subway” is also calling its users to rediscover social values such as (sharing space and time in a -) community and (feeling safe but free at the disposal of a -) security organisation and place these in the context of public means of transportation.

It is a concept-design that needs further development in order to solve the practical and safety issues that arise from an incautious use of this electronics, starting from answering the question of how the user controls his body level: when he is intentionally grounded (in order to enter the tube) and when he is lifted (in order to move freely).

                                                                        Entering the tube station is the beginning of a journey, totally predictable and restricted in terms of duration and space since one repeats it identically on his time schedule, on a daily basis. It is a harsh memory to build on through life.

References:

Metzger, Christopher, 2018. Neuroarchitecture, Jogis Verlag GmbH

Hertz, Garnet 2018. Desobedient Electronics, The Studio for Critical Making

[iriniasvisual-blog]

The figure of the Body

.Looking at a human figure across the table. Being with this figure. No talking, no touching, no further interaction. Isn’t the view enough to tell a story? Isn’t the figure enough to create a narrative space? Isn’t the body enough to “ground the symbolic processes of the mind”, like Lucy Suchman mentions?

I find myself growing a great interest in the conscious and unconscious act of figuration; in its semiotic dimensions and materialistic reflections. Everything can be included or implied in a figure. And while the figure may remain the same, apropos of its graphic elements, the figurations created in regard to it, actually vary. When I picture or talk about or face a figure, simultaneously I picture or talk about or face a whole conceptual universe around it. It is not an empty space. It is not a void outline of a subject or an object or a cyborg. It has substance and it is me, individually and collectively, that I shape this substance; not once but eternally. As long as I evolve and change, figurations will too. Like a liquid visual lexicon in a constant contact with the actual dictionary.

Lucy Suchman writes extensively and interestingly about the human figure and what identifies it as such when it comes to using this information in creating humanlike machines. “I consider three elements taken to be necessary for humanness in contemporary AI projects: embodiment, emotion, and sociality.” I would like to focus on the embodiment: “[…] information “lost its body” in the emerging sciences of the artificial over the last century. Recent developments in AI and robotics appear to reverse this trend, however, taking to heart arguments to the effect that embodiment, rather than being coincidental, is a fundamental condition for intelligence.”

Facing each other’s body constitutes the first interaction between two humans. This mirror-like identification of the other as one of the same species, is the first step of relating to him/her. In the “Imaginary”, Jacques Lacan argues that this need for identification with an external image is prompted by an experience of the body as fragmented. “The body in pieces finds its unity in the image of the other […] or its own specular image” Jacques-Alain Miller fleshes out. And so the humanlike figure of an AI is probably a way to conceive AI as filling in fragments of ourselves rather than adding something alien to our external environment.

“We know that the body is an object of medical knowledge. […] The living body is a subject too. It is us, we: for it is as embodied that we are human beings. So the body is the fleshy condition for, or, better, the fleshy situatedness of our modes of living. In being a living body we experience pain, hunger or agony as well as satisfaction, ecstasy or pleasure. And while the object-body is exposed and publicly displayed, the subject-body is private and beyond or before language.” In this extract, Annemarie Mol is figuring human body as an object and a subject and based on this approach, I am wondering whether the object is a structure of the subject, whether the body is a structure of the emotion, like the choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker claimed for dance.

 The figure of the body, the healthy body, the injured body, the young body, the old body, the white body, the black body, the woman’ s body, the man’ s body; what among all would be chosen to hοst an AI? What emotions and conditions would there be enclosed? 

                                                                                       I see and feel the body as a multidimensional space which receives stimuli, contains emotions and creates directions. 

References:

Suchman, Lucy, 2007. Human-machine configurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge University Press

Miller, Jacques-Alain, ed. 1988. The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 2: Te Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-55. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mol, Annemarie & Law, John, 2004. Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies: The example of Hypoglycaemia. Body & Society, SAGE publications